Most electronic calipers, dividers, and the like that are currently in use provide measurements only in conventional length or angle units such as inches, millimeters, degrees, or radians. Furthermore, devices that provide such measurements, particularly in the case of commercially-available electronic calipers, have become near-commodities. Elements such as the user-controlled functions, the number and spacing of the buttons to activate the functions, and the dimensions of the electronic housing and the LCD display portion have settled into a narrow range of configurations. These configurations provide the manufacturability, economical, functionality, and ergonomic factors that are expected or required by a majority of manufacturers and users of electronic calipers. As such, manufacturers and users are reluctant to accept design variations that may have undesirable effects, such as increasing the user-controlled functional complexity, increasing the number of buttons or decreasing their ergonomic spacing, increasing the ergonomic dimensions of the electronic housing, or decreasing the ergonomic visibility of LCD display elements, etc., even to a moderate extent.
If such undesirable effects are taken into account and mitigated during the design of electronic calipers, however, additional features may be added and accepted in new designs. An example of such a feature on an electronic caliper may be found in commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 7,246,032, to Feldman (hereinafter “the '032 Patent”), herein incorporated by reference in its entirety. The '032 Patent discloses an electronic caliper with a ratio-measuring mode. In the ratio-measuring mode, a ratio is determined from a reference measurement and a current measurement, such that the current measurement is divided by the reference measurement to display a ratio of the two measurements. Using an electronic caliper in this way allows a user to measure not only a ratio of dimensions of physical objects, but also a ratio on scaled drawings or other blueprint type plans, for example. As the caliper arms are moved, the current measurement changes and so, too, does the ratio displayed on the screen.